1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to assignment systems for complex environments, and more particularly to a method and apparatus providing automated staff assignment in hospital and industrial environments.
2. Description of the Related Art
Complex environments such as hospitals and industrial facilities typically include a large number of complex equipment, databases, staff, and patients or clients. Consequently, when an emergency occurs in a hospital or industrial facility, a lot of equipment needs attention, a multitude of databases need to be consulted, and a large number of staff personnel needs to be notified to address the emergency. The personnel assigned to take action in a given emergency is usually on the move somewhere in the hospital or industrial environment. Therefore, wireless communication means are essential for contacting the appropriate personnel within a short timeframe. The personnel that needs to address the emergency depends on the type of the emergency, the time of day, as well as other circumstances such as personnel attendance and competing tasks. Therefore, complex assignment and selection systems are needed to determine the correct identity of personnel to be notified during emergency alerts. Such complex functions can be best performed by an automated assignment system.
In complex environments such as hospitals and industrial facilities, alerts are generated from a wide variety of equipment. An automated assignment system needs to be able to receive alerts from various kinds of systems, interpret many different input protocols, and transfer alerts to different messaging systems and devices. In an automated assignment system, changing the assignments configuration for various emergency alerts needs to be a simple task for the authorized personnel. The efficiency and speed of operation of an automatic assignment system directly impacts operations in a hospital or industrial facility, and can save lives.
Existing staff assignment systems encounter significant challenges when used in a complex environment such as a hospital or an industrial facility. Response turn-around time is often an issue, due to the large number of formats and protocols in which emergency alerts are transmitted. Automation of assignment systems is hindered because of inability to process various message formats. Moreover, inefficient staff assignments are often made because of difficulty to quickly select the escalation path appropriate for the alarm type, time of day, etc.
A few publications have studied assignment systems for hospital environments. One such system is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,801,780 B1 entitled “Method and Apparatus for Providing Intelligent Emergency Paging.” With the method described in this work, however, no processing and assignment for messages other than pages are described. Moreover, the assignment system described in the above work is not configured to interface with external automated systems and extract information automatically from incoming messages.
Another technique is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,942,986 entitled “System and Method for Automatic Critical Event Notification.” The technique described in this work, however, is limited to pagers and pager networks with PIN protected access, and can handle only a limited range of message alert formats. Moreover, the message alerts addressed in the above work represent only one type of emergency (a medical emergency). No alternative escalation paths and plans are provided in case pages are not received by the designated physicians and nurses.
A disclosed embodiment of the application addresses these and other issues by utilizing an automated staff assignment method and apparatus. The automated staff assignment method and apparatus can understand and process message alerts in a variety of formats and sent through a variety of protocols, and can transfer response action messages through a variety of protocols. The automated staff assignment method and apparatus can perform efficient staff assignment under multiple constraints and in real-time, and can sort and search through a large amount of information to determine the personnel trained and available to address a given emergency.